Automatic translation is related to storing previously translated paragraphs, sentences, sentence fragments, or phrases and reusing translations when needed. Language search engines typically search in one or more translation memories for the translations based on input strings submitted for translation. Once the input strings are matched with corresponding translations, the corresponding translations are returned in the form of output strings.
However, searching for short strings often yields multiple alternative translation results, because a single word may have multiple meanings in a source language and the multiple meanings may have multiple translations in a target language. For example, considering English as the source language and German as the target language, the string “to” has at least three meanings in English, namely expressing direction to a person or a place, expressing a point of limit in time, and expressing an aim or an intention. The different meanings have different translations in German, namely, “an”, “bis”, and “nach”. Hence, it is challenging to translate single-word strings automatically and accurately without additional information such as translation context.